I was on a hiring committee (student representative) at a university, hiring a CS faculty member (who could have been cross listed with any of physics, business, math, or econ). Probably half of the applicants had something to the effect of 'fluent in MS office' on their resumes. The other half were coming straight from academia.
Such is the market we live in. For a tenure track faculty position we tended to prefer candidates who tailored their resume to us specifically, and I'd sort of hope you know that we don't care if you're fluent in MS office as a tenured faculty member, but I can see having it on most resumes that have to go through an HR department.
Speed is important. And it depends what bugs exactly you're referring to. But top end cards are for people who are gaming on multiple monitors or using 30 inch plus monitors, or otherwise 'end' cases, and even then they have multi thousand dollar versions if you're really serious about your graphics. Not that you can't get something out of a really good gpu, but if you're on a 22 inch display, by the time software catches up to needing all your top end hardware, there will be new technology not in your high end hardware.
It's a bit like Fiat and Honda arguing over who makes the fastest F1 car to a crowd of ordinary consumers.
*caveat: I have a ATI 5970 and i7 980, but I am decidedly an end case even though I only game on a 24 inch display I do game engines research and testing, with debugging on or when trying to do something new top end hardware can be ground to a halt pretty easily.
Because you don't really want labview skills. You want engineers or physicists, and they can be trained up in labview if needed. That isn't to say people don't use labview, only that it's just a tool, and the hard part is learning the science or engineering. Most of the physicists I know still program in fortran (77, not even 95), but it doesn't show up on want ads for PhD in physics: must know fortran, because well... they can learn fortran.
CS and Software eng hiring is much more driven by business guys who, ask questions like.. I kid you not "Do you know HTML" (I got asked that in a job interview after my MSc in comp sci). The tools used shouldn't replace the knowledge that drives their use. However, if you did your CS degree and only learned to program using C++ the program probably wasn't very good, but in engineering you can do the whole thing with well.. labview. The question I suppose with.net is if you only really know.net do you know enough about programs to be any good at writing them.
But of course... you don't choose who offers you a job first, and they pay for.net, you learn.net. Because 50k/year programming.net is better than welfare, and better than 20k/year at macdonalds.
it ties your all of your records to a single point of failure. We have that for faculty where I am. I happen to be on the department faculty e-mailing list, though I'm not faculty, and I see what they say about it, and some faculty absolutely refuse to participate in certain online activites specifically because of SSO. If you have a vote for say members for a committee, or room bookings, or your e-mail, it's the same as the marks database, and your HR record etc.
I'm torn. On one hand, a single point of failure, since you have to know people will use the same PWD for work/school as they do else where is a serious risk. But having too many systems where they need to keep separate passwords, and therefore write them all down, is probably equally bad. Building 'throw away' passwords for every little thing seems like a difficult system to build and manage effectively.
We could apply this principle more broadly. Business here is prohibited from doing business with suppliers that violate their own countries laws.
One could go a step further and say you cannot do business with a supplier that does not adhere to international laws, or even does not meat Main_Countries enviro/social laws.
About 110 years ago Belgium, which was this upstanding member of Europe, and a strong supporter of rights and liberty also held, as the kings personal property, what was in essence a giant slave state in the Congo. Those cheap supplies both benefited the monarch personally and belgian companies in international trade. At least until the british caught on and told the rest of us. We compelled them to convert the congo into a colony of belgium. Which I guess is less bad. But that's not the point. The point is the belgians themselves weren't even upholding the laws they claimed to adhere to, and in doing so gave themselves an unfair advantage in business against the rest of us. That wasn't acceptable then, and whether its software piracy, human rights, or the environment it isn't acceptable now.
I'm not sure limited hardware is fair. Dual core 1GHz, 1 Gig of ram is going to be pretty much on par with dual core smart phones or smaller tablets.
The software side of things... I'm skeptical but you never know. Though RIM is aiming for the business crowd, not home users, so if its gaming performance on android apps is horrid I'm not sure that's a huge problem.
They may be figuring that during the transition (or after) that having a big block of them, especially for legacy services would be worthwhile. There's probably a lot of infrastructure out there that won't ever switch to IPv6 gracefully (if at all), but might be important. Sort of like IE6 that won't die. I suspect there will be a lot of custom equipment/servers that will need to keep plugged into IPv4 long after the rest of us have moved to IPv6.
It's not like 7 million dollars is a lot of money to MS, and if it turns out to be wasted it won't be a noticeable loss.
or a bunch of people having access to data they do not understand, and inducing panic. Does a yellow circle mean I need to be cautious about my radiation exposure? I don't have heath care and can't afford cancer, maybe should wall myself up. The government isn't telling me why my number (e.g. 34) is nearly twice as high as someone else (18), that sounds really bad.
yes it's cool, you can crowdsource data. But data without any real understanding of what it means, or presented in such a way as to be alarmist, or even just presented badly can do more harm than good.
ya, it's an absurdly large sum of money by any measure, or for pretty much anything, at least as most of us who speak english understand it.
Though, there are 'short' and 'long' scale uses of billion and trillion, which are well, wildly different, and so someone from continental europe or an older english person may be easily confused into thinking the article means a factor of 1 million different from what they actually do. Yes, having two scales with the same names is stupid.
The only figures I have are for 2005, but the UK had worth of 5.8 trillion pounds (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/value-of-uk-plc-rises-to-163100000-for-each-man-woman-and-child-500266.html), with a GDP of 1.2 trillion, giving a roughly factor of 5 difference. Assuming that ratio roughly holds for 2010/2011 and to other countries, the total net worth of the world is about 300 trillion dollars (nominal but I'm not sure on PPP it would be much different).
It's not like they are claiming damages for just one year, so we probably shouldn't claim total economic output for just one year.
I mean, obviously the music business is worth nearly 1/4 of everything on the planet, food, cars, TV's aircraft, computers, houses, and limewire must have scurried away all that money. Put another way, the total inhabited land area of the planet is 150 million square kilometres, so the music business is worth approximatedly 1/4 of that, which is the total area of russia, the USA and china combined.
The idea that the internet devalues content is interesting. It devalues redundant content. Because if I think X, and get paid 100k/year to write about it, someone else who also thinks X will give it away for free or less than I am charging. That doesn't mean the market for opinion X is limited, only that you don't need to necessarily have it from multiple places. The Chinese state press can report as well as the NYT that 7 bombs fell in tripoli on at whatever time.
The current system worked fine when print was mostly regional. Even the US market vs various european language markets etc. But the world of news and information has changed to one big international market. Where before the London version of the news probably said the same thing as the new york version, those were separate markets, now it's one market, and one fact. This means there is going to need to be consolidation, and print and TV are going to need to merge into a combined print (for however long it lasts), web, and TV content house, and there are going to be a lot less companies. I think this will probably kill a few of the UK and US companies (along with smaller ones like in Canada and australia), they will end up being the local reporting part of a bigger outfit.
Whether that killing off of companies is done through mergers or bankruptcy remains to be seen, but the NYT seems to be working very hard to tick off anyone who might be willing to give them money.
Any point where they could enter a birthdate, you can use that. If they post what school they're at, and you know they're under about grade 6, you can use that (especially handy if a school only goes to grade 6), or anything else about what grade they are in. Probably user reports.
I wouldn't want to go blabbing the technique used, just because it's probably possible to troll people with it who are close to the age. And one thing you want to do is get em hooked young so they'll be customers for the next 60 years, not get them angry and quitting your service at 14.
Admittedly, I'm in canada, but I suspect the perception here is about the same.
I'm my current grad programme in CS, we have about 120 grad students, (about 60 MSc about 60 PhD), of whom around 75% are foreign - non first world, so I'm not counting US, EU students as 'foreign' for this purpose, since we all face the same problem. The vast majority of our undergrads are domestic students, while the vast majority of grads are foreign. The undergrads can walk out of here and get jobs that easily run 40-50k and usually a lot more than that. Grad student: 20k.
The foreign grad students have significantly changed the bar for academic excellence. We take the best and brightest from other places, and that means to succeed in grad school you have to be at their level. When foreign students were 10, 15% of the class it wasn't an issue. But now 8/10 of the people in my classes are going to be from the top 5% of wherever they're from, which means to have marks competitive with theirs you pretty much have to be top 5% here. So yes, our grads are just as good, because by swamping ourselves with foreign students we've raised the bar of excellence. I'm not sure that's good or bad. So then why do we need foreign talent? Because foreign talent has raised the bar, and now can only be filled with foreigners.
There are of course a lot of other issues. If you can learn to do math in-spite of the education system, you can do fine in STEM classes, but you probably won't actually learn to do it properly from the education system. Which makes it both hard, and scary to risk STEM as a career. It's also a lot of work, with a lot of debt, that may not pay off.
Professor Matloff is specifically opposed to 'flooding the market' with foreign STEM workers. That's missing a few basic problems of economics. First and foremost, those people already exist. If they come here they may keep salaries flat or drive them down, but if they stay home in India or China they would cost substantially less, and in the end make outsourcing even more viable. Bringing them here keeps the global costs of STEM work up, and rewards the best and brightest from their home countries with a chance at much more financially productive life (a good incentive to get your people to work). A simple look at http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp will tell you pretty quickly that STEM pays well, possibly even too much (compare petroleum engineer mid career to well... anything else. IMO petroleum engineering is not substantially harder to do than chemical engineering, yet it pays 50% more). It's not like we have suddenly driven the price of STEM below that of Drama degrees, the difference between the starting salary of drama and civil eng is about 8k, but and engineering degree only costs about 2k more than a drama degree (around here anyway), so if anything there is room there for some salary depreciation and STEM would still be the best paying place to be.
IMO what we need is an education system that actually teaches people something about how all this technology stuff they want and use works in high school, so they can choose to pursue that in detail when they get to university. Right now we have first years who don't know what electricity, the internet, a CPU, HTML, or quantum mechanics are. If I have to explain the difference between a CPU and the whole computer to a comp sci student is, they're in serious trouble (and yet some of that crowd can write doubly linked lists when they get here). We have kids who's understanding of electricity is 'some magically thing that is carried over wires and comes out of the wall'. How do you seriously expect them to be interested in designing new batteries or helping to develop new energy technology and so on if they don't even know what electricity is when they start in engineering degrees? That ignorance of basic science, and ignorance of basic technology principles (what is cryptography?) should not be things we teach only to that select few (around here about 15% of our un
And there's a lot to be done with different architectures, and just plain organizing computers differently (basically changing up how the CPU, GPU and various memory systems connect to each other).
Right now all of that experimental stuff pretty much stays experimental, or custom, because by the time you get it out the door the traditional CPU-GPU market has gone through a tick-tock cycle and no matter how good your idea was, it's still not as economical as a newer version of your traditional hardware.
Once that progress slows there will be time for more innovation in how the computer does it's thing.
Oh and memristors might change the whole show anyway. They might not, and the same could be said for quantum information processing. In either of those cases even if you fairly rapidly reach a limit on die size you still have a whole lot of time to completely redesign the hardware to use those parts 'optimally' however one chooses to define that.
Who would have purchased an android phone 6 months after launch? Who would have predicted that Android market share would outpace iphone market share as quickly as it has?
Right now MS is moving at a glacial pace with windows 7 phones, which isn't encouraging for their business, but the one thing you don't want to be is a 3rd party supplier and find out you've made enemies with the new big dog in town. In 12 or 18 months with nokia on board MS could have a vastly superior product to anything else on the market.
They probably won't, because they seem to want to work really hard to fail, but that could change. I think every 3rd party phone maker (i.e. anyone who isn't apple or RIM) should have a MS phone strategy. Just in case. That strategy could be 3 guys and a dev kit. But it should be there. Who knows, maybe MS has some killer app up it's sleeve that will take the phone market by storm, that will suddenly make us all converts. The vast majority of even Android users run windows PC's after all, one would hope MS has some ideas on how Window 7 computer could play nice with windows 7 phones.
And we should all be careful not to suppose that the pictures taken show anything other than a very high resolution view of a cloud of steam or a pile of debris, or a lot of useless information out of context.
They have water bombers trying to get water into pools/onto reactors. So I'm 99% sure they are going to have before, and after photos, but since there is a giant steam plume when water actually hits something that's really hot the 'before' picture might be a crystal clear image of something very bad, and the 'after' picture a giant fuzzy mess, or maybe the water takes some amount of time to get to the pool after being dropped. Taking someone important away from the operation to explain to the press what the pictures mean, if anything, in context, might not be the best use of their time, given that there's probably a constant stream of photo's and video to be analysed, and a relatively small number of people who could make much sense of it.
If this was just some random nuclear accident you might be able to get better luck, former employees people who've visited the site etc. But I suspect after being hit by a tsunami there's a lot of debris everywhere, anyone who actually knows what's going on on the ground probably is on the ground, and kinda busy at the moment.
Why do they need ground forces? The point is to get gaddafi to leave, not to take over the country. A combination of supplying materiel to the resistance, and eliminating air threat, along with close air support against any heavy equipment they find will hopefully either convince gaddafi to go pitch his tent on Chavez's lawn for the rest of his life, or empower the rebels to take over.
Well, that, and they're paying mercenaries and using special forces to support the rebels. Libya is a country of 6.4 million, only half of whom are adults, and about half the country is allied with the resistance. I'd guess the adult population under gaddafi's control is around 1.5 -2 million people. Not exactly a huge resistance for the combined might of denmark and ireland let alone the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy and anyone else who wants some combat experience for their pilots.
That's because there are only a handful of DRM systems, and once you've broken version 4 of the system versions 4.1-4.100 are usually trivial, and version 5 is unlikely to be much better. And once you've broken it for one game, the same works for all the others.
But as you may have noticed with DA's rather flakey login. You either have it on your account which you're logged into, or you don't get it. It's much harder to pirate all that DLC content *and* do that for every game that has it's own account system. And if they move save games there it's even worse (and harder).
4G had a definition. 100 Mb/s for high mobility, 1Gb/s for low mobility.
Which were basically impossible goals to reach with current technology.
Enter HSDPA, LTE and EV-DO.
These technologies are significantly faster (or at least can be) than traditional '3G'.
So here's the problem. Are they 3.5G? 3G enhnaced? Are they close enough to 4G to warrant being called that?
The answer is... change the definition of 4G. Because, and lets be realistic here, No one is rolling out True 4G networks, not even close. But they are rollilng out technologies that are 2, 3 (even more) time faster than the current technology. To consumers, doubling performance or tripling it warrants more than 0.5. Which is a problem, because well, 4G actually means something. But once one guy starts using 4G, if you aren't either you fight with them in court, or you start using '4G' and let the definitions be damned and change them.
And when true 4G rolls around, it will itself probably be 3x faster than the current tech.
To be fair, at least where I live (ontario canada) he's sort of right, a private company could outsource the database to india for 1/5th or 1/10th the price the government pays, because the government can't get away with that sort of behaviour.
Who exactly would you consider a great paragon of virtue to be democratically chosen (however stupid that may be) to be one of africa's 13 representatives, without serving two consecutive terms? Even the US, the UK, Poland and russia are on there, and frankly, the first 3 are complicit in torture and mass murder from the invasion of iraq and guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, and russia is well, russia. Do we perhaps do away with the 13 african states, because it would be hard to find 13 african states who uphold human rights all that well, and dictate to them from New York and Geneva how to manage their human rights? The UNHCR exists primarily to complain about the Israeli treatment of palestinians, they chose a broader name than that, but frankly libya is as good at complaining about israel as anyone else.
Because they couldn't call it the UN committee to complain about Israel they got caught with their pants down on "human rights", but it's not like anyone on that body gets to be anything other than a hedge against constant criticism of someone, or a constant criticizer.
Just like everywhere else, democracy is bought and paid for. The UN is no different, except that it likes to give lip service to every idea out there. That is both its great strength and great weakness. Everyone gets a say, even the crazy people. It also means that if you can't agree to it, it doesn't happen. Want a XXX TLD, probably not going to happen, want to ban porn on the web, probably not going to happen, want to make sure China gets more IP addresses than a major US university, that probably would happen. Because for all it's faults, the UN is inherently more fair than any one country trying to be fair - but not at the expense of its own interests.
It also wrongly supposes that all of that information is necessarily private. My full name, address, phone number, e-mail address are already public whether I like it or not as part of working for the government and the information it makes available, as it does the government portion of my income.
I'm not 100% sure on my date of birth, so I wouldn't include that necessarily, but I'm pretty sure it's public too.
And I'm in ontario and make 22k a year as a grad student. People who make 100k a year have their salary published in a giant list and have since 1996, which, along with their work profiles (including phone numbers and e-mail addresses), and your actual address in the phone book.
So why is any of that public? Well name, work e-mail, work phone, we all are supposed to have webpages with that info on them.. Salary, well that can be reconstructed because our contracts are public, and you know when I was hired, under what contract. So give or take 500 bucks you know my salary pretty trivially. Address, date of birth are all public, if somewhat buried, in records about enrollment (ages of entering students, ages of leaving students, geographic distribution of applicants etc.), and if you make over 100k a year that's pretty much plastered out there by the government on it's sunshine list anyway.
So if someone actually knows my name, it's not all that hard to figure out any of that information. Facebook may put it in one place, but for a lot of us, especially if our facebook profile is intentionally set to public, there's nothing there that cannot be gleamed from our corporate webpages too.
That legal cost might be because it was precedent setting, and because it involved an election and politicians who, naturally, are in touch with a lot of lawyers.
The damages amount might have something to do with the fact that the defendant claimed this was mistaken identity, as someone was actually removed from the polling station in question, just not the person he implicated. He admitted pretty much everything and agreed to the situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if in future you could see the legal costs go down a fair bit.
Oh and it isn't clear from any of the articles I read, but it looks like the tweet didn't materially change the outcome of the election.
The big thing with apple was that *Apple* decides when and how to devalue or enhance phones, whereas for every other manufacturer it's the carrier (and while yes, they only had one carrier in the US for a long time, they had a lot of carriers around the world who got the update at the same time as the US).
The Nexus One and Nexus S are googles attempt to get in on this actually keeping the phone updated idea.
Of course as with all consumer electronics, it is a double edged sword. The carriers don't want to deal with the hassle of a bad update bricking phones, because they are the ones that have to endure the man power of the support costs, messed up inventories and generally angry customers. So to them, they want everything tested every way they can think of, and they only really care about their network (think HSUPAon the Atrix 4g), because there's also backend problems to think about. And of course like computers, customers may be too stupid to keep their phones properly updated, so if you can push it OTA at them, to block viruses etc. that has significant benefits to both the network and potentially the consumer as well. But in doing that you prevent the interesting, innovative things that people who actually understand the technology they bought can do with it. Or at least make it hard for them.
MS has talked about making a developer version of the Phone OS available. That's probably a good compromise, hackers get access to hacking things, and people who don't know what a developer version means stick with their carrier approved OTA updates. Assuming MS doesn't give carriers an update that bricks their phones, again.
Slashdot Mirror
I was on a hiring committee (student representative) at a university, hiring a CS faculty member (who could have been cross listed with any of physics, business, math, or econ). Probably half of the applicants had something to the effect of 'fluent in MS office' on their resumes. The other half were coming straight from academia.
Such is the market we live in. For a tenure track faculty position we tended to prefer candidates who tailored their resume to us specifically, and I'd sort of hope you know that we don't care if you're fluent in MS office as a tenured faculty member, but I can see having it on most resumes that have to go through an HR department.
Speed is important. And it depends what bugs exactly you're referring to. But top end cards are for people who are gaming on multiple monitors or using 30 inch plus monitors, or otherwise 'end' cases, and even then they have multi thousand dollar versions if you're really serious about your graphics. Not that you can't get something out of a really good gpu, but if you're on a 22 inch display, by the time software catches up to needing all your top end hardware, there will be new technology not in your high end hardware.
It's a bit like Fiat and Honda arguing over who makes the fastest F1 car to a crowd of ordinary consumers.
*caveat: I have a ATI 5970 and i7 980, but I am decidedly an end case even though I only game on a 24 inch display I do game engines research and testing, with debugging on or when trying to do something new top end hardware can be ground to a halt pretty easily.
Because you don't really want labview skills. You want engineers or physicists, and they can be trained up in labview if needed. That isn't to say people don't use labview, only that it's just a tool, and the hard part is learning the science or engineering. Most of the physicists I know still program in fortran (77, not even 95), but it doesn't show up on want ads for PhD in physics: must know fortran, because well... they can learn fortran.
CS and Software eng hiring is much more driven by business guys who, ask questions like.. I kid you not "Do you know HTML" (I got asked that in a job interview after my MSc in comp sci). The tools used shouldn't replace the knowledge that drives their use. However, if you did your CS degree and only learned to program using C++ the program probably wasn't very good, but in engineering you can do the whole thing with well.. labview. The question I suppose with .net is if you only really know .net do you know enough about programs to be any good at writing them.
But of course... you don't choose who offers you a job first, and they pay for .net, you learn .net. Because 50k/year programming .net is better than welfare, and better than 20k/year at macdonalds.
it ties your all of your records to a single point of failure. We have that for faculty where I am. I happen to be on the department faculty e-mailing list, though I'm not faculty, and I see what they say about it, and some faculty absolutely refuse to participate in certain online activites specifically because of SSO. If you have a vote for say members for a committee, or room bookings, or your e-mail, it's the same as the marks database, and your HR record etc.
I'm torn. On one hand, a single point of failure, since you have to know people will use the same PWD for work/school as they do else where is a serious risk. But having too many systems where they need to keep separate passwords, and therefore write them all down, is probably equally bad. Building 'throw away' passwords for every little thing seems like a difficult system to build and manage effectively.
We could apply this principle more broadly. Business here is prohibited from doing business with suppliers that violate their own countries laws.
One could go a step further and say you cannot do business with a supplier that does not adhere to international laws, or even does not meat Main_Countries enviro/social laws.
About 110 years ago Belgium, which was this upstanding member of Europe, and a strong supporter of rights and liberty also held, as the kings personal property, what was in essence a giant slave state in the Congo. Those cheap supplies both benefited the monarch personally and belgian companies in international trade. At least until the british caught on and told the rest of us. We compelled them to convert the congo into a colony of belgium. Which I guess is less bad. But that's not the point. The point is the belgians themselves weren't even upholding the laws they claimed to adhere to, and in doing so gave themselves an unfair advantage in business against the rest of us. That wasn't acceptable then, and whether its software piracy, human rights, or the environment it isn't acceptable now.
I'm not sure limited hardware is fair. Dual core 1GHz, 1 Gig of ram is going to be pretty much on par with dual core smart phones or smaller tablets.
The software side of things... I'm skeptical but you never know. Though RIM is aiming for the business crowd, not home users, so if its gaming performance on android apps is horrid I'm not sure that's a huge problem.
They may be figuring that during the transition (or after) that having a big block of them, especially for legacy services would be worthwhile. There's probably a lot of infrastructure out there that won't ever switch to IPv6 gracefully (if at all), but might be important. Sort of like IE6 that won't die. I suspect there will be a lot of custom equipment/servers that will need to keep plugged into IPv4 long after the rest of us have moved to IPv6.
It's not like 7 million dollars is a lot of money to MS, and if it turns out to be wasted it won't be a noticeable loss.
or a bunch of people having access to data they do not understand, and inducing panic. Does a yellow circle mean I need to be cautious about my radiation exposure? I don't have heath care and can't afford cancer, maybe should wall myself up. The government isn't telling me why my number (e.g. 34) is nearly twice as high as someone else (18), that sounds really bad.
yes it's cool, you can crowdsource data. But data without any real understanding of what it means, or presented in such a way as to be alarmist, or even just presented badly can do more harm than good.
ya, it's an absurdly large sum of money by any measure, or for pretty much anything, at least as most of us who speak english understand it.
Though, there are 'short' and 'long' scale uses of billion and trillion, which are well, wildly different, and so someone from continental europe or an older english person may be easily confused into thinking the article means a factor of 1 million different from what they actually do. Yes, having two scales with the same names is stupid.
To be fair. wealth and GDP are not the same.
The only figures I have are for 2005, but the UK had worth of 5.8 trillion pounds (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/value-of-uk-plc-rises-to-163100000-for-each-man-woman-and-child-500266.html), with a GDP of 1.2 trillion, giving a roughly factor of 5 difference. Assuming that ratio roughly holds for 2010/2011 and to other countries, the total net worth of the world is about 300 trillion dollars (nominal but I'm not sure on PPP it would be much different).
It's not like they are claiming damages for just one year, so we probably shouldn't claim total economic output for just one year.
I mean, obviously the music business is worth nearly 1/4 of everything on the planet, food, cars, TV's aircraft, computers, houses, and limewire must have scurried away all that money. Put another way, the total inhabited land area of the planet is 150 million square kilometres, so the music business is worth approximatedly 1/4 of that, which is the total area of russia, the USA and china combined.
The idea that the internet devalues content is interesting. It devalues redundant content. Because if I think X, and get paid 100k/year to write about it, someone else who also thinks X will give it away for free or less than I am charging. That doesn't mean the market for opinion X is limited, only that you don't need to necessarily have it from multiple places. The Chinese state press can report as well as the NYT that 7 bombs fell in tripoli on at whatever time.
The current system worked fine when print was mostly regional. Even the US market vs various european language markets etc. But the world of news and information has changed to one big international market. Where before the London version of the news probably said the same thing as the new york version, those were separate markets, now it's one market, and one fact. This means there is going to need to be consolidation, and print and TV are going to need to merge into a combined print (for however long it lasts), web, and TV content house, and there are going to be a lot less companies. I think this will probably kill a few of the UK and US companies (along with smaller ones like in Canada and australia), they will end up being the local reporting part of a bigger outfit.
Whether that killing off of companies is done through mergers or bankruptcy remains to be seen, but the NYT seems to be working very hard to tick off anyone who might be willing to give them money.
A couple of options jump out at me.
Any point where they could enter a birthdate, you can use that.
If they post what school they're at, and you know they're under about grade 6, you can use that (especially handy if a school only goes to grade 6), or anything else about what grade they are in.
Probably user reports.
I wouldn't want to go blabbing the technique used, just because it's probably possible to troll people with it who are close to the age. And one thing you want to do is get em hooked young so they'll be customers for the next 60 years, not get them angry and quitting your service at 14.
Admittedly, I'm in canada, but I suspect the perception here is about the same.
I'm my current grad programme in CS, we have about 120 grad students, (about 60 MSc about 60 PhD), of whom around 75% are foreign - non first world, so I'm not counting US, EU students as 'foreign' for this purpose, since we all face the same problem. The vast majority of our undergrads are domestic students, while the vast majority of grads are foreign. The undergrads can walk out of here and get jobs that easily run 40-50k and usually a lot more than that. Grad student: 20k.
The foreign grad students have significantly changed the bar for academic excellence. We take the best and brightest from other places, and that means to succeed in grad school you have to be at their level. When foreign students were 10, 15% of the class it wasn't an issue. But now 8/10 of the people in my classes are going to be from the top 5% of wherever they're from, which means to have marks competitive with theirs you pretty much have to be top 5% here. So yes, our grads are just as good, because by swamping ourselves with foreign students we've raised the bar of excellence. I'm not sure that's good or bad. So then why do we need foreign talent? Because foreign talent has raised the bar, and now can only be filled with foreigners.
There are of course a lot of other issues. If you can learn to do math in-spite of the education system, you can do fine in STEM classes, but you probably won't actually learn to do it properly from the education system. Which makes it both hard, and scary to risk STEM as a career. It's also a lot of work, with a lot of debt, that may not pay off.
Professor Matloff is specifically opposed to 'flooding the market' with foreign STEM workers. That's missing a few basic problems of economics. First and foremost, those people already exist. If they come here they may keep salaries flat or drive them down, but if they stay home in India or China they would cost substantially less, and in the end make outsourcing even more viable. Bringing them here keeps the global costs of STEM work up, and rewards the best and brightest from their home countries with a chance at much more financially productive life (a good incentive to get your people to work). A simple look at http://www.payscale.com/best-colleges/degrees.asp will tell you pretty quickly that STEM pays well, possibly even too much (compare petroleum engineer mid career to well... anything else. IMO petroleum engineering is not substantially harder to do than chemical engineering, yet it pays 50% more). It's not like we have suddenly driven the price of STEM below that of Drama degrees, the difference between the starting salary of drama and civil eng is about 8k, but and engineering degree only costs about 2k more than a drama degree (around here anyway), so if anything there is room there for some salary depreciation and STEM would still be the best paying place to be.
IMO what we need is an education system that actually teaches people something about how all this technology stuff they want and use works in high school, so they can choose to pursue that in detail when they get to university. Right now we have first years who don't know what electricity, the internet, a CPU, HTML, or quantum mechanics are. If I have to explain the difference between a CPU and the whole computer to a comp sci student is, they're in serious trouble (and yet some of that crowd can write doubly linked lists when they get here). We have kids who's understanding of electricity is 'some magically thing that is carried over wires and comes out of the wall'. How do you seriously expect them to be interested in designing new batteries or helping to develop new energy technology and so on if they don't even know what electricity is when they start in engineering degrees? That ignorance of basic science, and ignorance of basic technology principles (what is cryptography?) should not be things we teach only to that select few (around here about 15% of our un
And there's a lot to be done with different architectures, and just plain organizing computers differently (basically changing up how the CPU, GPU and various memory systems connect to each other).
Right now all of that experimental stuff pretty much stays experimental, or custom, because by the time you get it out the door the traditional CPU-GPU market has gone through a tick-tock cycle and no matter how good your idea was, it's still not as economical as a newer version of your traditional hardware.
Once that progress slows there will be time for more innovation in how the computer does it's thing.
Oh and memristors might change the whole show anyway. They might not, and the same could be said for quantum information processing. In either of those cases even if you fairly rapidly reach a limit on die size you still have a whole lot of time to completely redesign the hardware to use those parts 'optimally' however one chooses to define that.
Who would have purchased an android phone 6 months after launch? Who would have predicted that Android market share would outpace iphone market share as quickly as it has?
Right now MS is moving at a glacial pace with windows 7 phones, which isn't encouraging for their business, but the one thing you don't want to be is a 3rd party supplier and find out you've made enemies with the new big dog in town. In 12 or 18 months with nokia on board MS could have a vastly superior product to anything else on the market.
They probably won't, because they seem to want to work really hard to fail, but that could change. I think every 3rd party phone maker (i.e. anyone who isn't apple or RIM) should have a MS phone strategy. Just in case. That strategy could be 3 guys and a dev kit. But it should be there. Who knows, maybe MS has some killer app up it's sleeve that will take the phone market by storm, that will suddenly make us all converts. The vast majority of even Android users run windows PC's after all, one would hope MS has some ideas on how Window 7 computer could play nice with windows 7 phones.
And we should all be careful not to suppose that the pictures taken show anything other than a very high resolution view of a cloud of steam or a pile of debris, or a lot of useless information out of context.
They have water bombers trying to get water into pools/onto reactors. So I'm 99% sure they are going to have before, and after photos, but since there is a giant steam plume when water actually hits something that's really hot the 'before' picture might be a crystal clear image of something very bad, and the 'after' picture a giant fuzzy mess, or maybe the water takes some amount of time to get to the pool after being dropped. Taking someone important away from the operation to explain to the press what the pictures mean, if anything, in context, might not be the best use of their time, given that there's probably a constant stream of photo's and video to be analysed, and a relatively small number of people who could make much sense of it.
If this was just some random nuclear accident you might be able to get better luck, former employees people who've visited the site etc. But I suspect after being hit by a tsunami there's a lot of debris everywhere, anyone who actually knows what's going on on the ground probably is on the ground, and kinda busy at the moment.
Why do they need ground forces? The point is to get gaddafi to leave, not to take over the country. A combination of supplying materiel to the resistance, and eliminating air threat, along with close air support against any heavy equipment they find will hopefully either convince gaddafi to go pitch his tent on Chavez's lawn for the rest of his life, or empower the rebels to take over.
Well, that, and they're paying mercenaries and using special forces to support the rebels. Libya is a country of 6.4 million, only half of whom are adults, and about half the country is allied with the resistance. I'd guess the adult population under gaddafi's control is around 1.5 -2 million people. Not exactly a huge resistance for the combined might of denmark and ireland let alone the US, UK, Canada, France, Italy and anyone else who wants some combat experience for their pilots.
ya, it stores all of the settings of the router, which determine where all the data is transmitted to...
That's because there are only a handful of DRM systems, and once you've broken version 4 of the system versions 4.1-4.100 are usually trivial, and version 5 is unlikely to be much better. And once you've broken it for one game, the same works for all the others.
But as you may have noticed with DA's rather flakey login. You either have it on your account which you're logged into, or you don't get it. It's much harder to pirate all that DLC content *and* do that for every game that has it's own account system. And if they move save games there it's even worse (and harder).
4G had a definition. 100 Mb/s for high mobility, 1Gb/s for low mobility.
Which were basically impossible goals to reach with current technology.
Enter HSDPA, LTE and EV-DO.
These technologies are significantly faster (or at least can be) than traditional '3G'.
So here's the problem. Are they 3.5G? 3G enhnaced? Are they close enough to 4G to warrant being called that?
The answer is... change the definition of 4G. Because, and lets be realistic here, No one is rolling out True 4G networks, not even close. But they are rollilng out technologies that are 2, 3 (even more) time faster than the current technology. To consumers, doubling performance or tripling it warrants more than 0.5. Which is a problem, because well, 4G actually means something. But once one guy starts using 4G, if you aren't either you fight with them in court, or you start using '4G' and let the definitions be damned and change them.
And when true 4G rolls around, it will itself probably be 3x faster than the current tech.
To be fair, at least where I live (ontario canada) he's sort of right, a private company could outsource the database to india for 1/5th or 1/10th the price the government pays, because the government can't get away with that sort of behaviour.
Who exactly would you consider a great paragon of virtue to be democratically chosen (however stupid that may be) to be one of africa's 13 representatives, without serving two consecutive terms? Even the US, the UK, Poland and russia are on there, and frankly, the first 3 are complicit in torture and mass murder from the invasion of iraq and guantanamo and extraordinary rendition, and russia is well, russia. Do we perhaps do away with the 13 african states, because it would be hard to find 13 african states who uphold human rights all that well, and dictate to them from New York and Geneva how to manage their human rights? The UNHCR exists primarily to complain about the Israeli treatment of palestinians, they chose a broader name than that, but frankly libya is as good at complaining about israel as anyone else.
Because they couldn't call it the UN committee to complain about Israel they got caught with their pants down on "human rights", but it's not like anyone on that body gets to be anything other than a hedge against constant criticism of someone, or a constant criticizer.
Just like everywhere else, democracy is bought and paid for. The UN is no different, except that it likes to give lip service to every idea out there. That is both its great strength and great weakness. Everyone gets a say, even the crazy people. It also means that if you can't agree to it, it doesn't happen. Want a XXX TLD, probably not going to happen, want to ban porn on the web, probably not going to happen, want to make sure China gets more IP addresses than a major US university, that probably would happen. Because for all it's faults, the UN is inherently more fair than any one country trying to be fair - but not at the expense of its own interests.
It also wrongly supposes that all of that information is necessarily private. My full name, address, phone number, e-mail address are already public whether I like it or not as part of working for the government and the information it makes available, as it does the government portion of my income.
I'm not 100% sure on my date of birth, so I wouldn't include that necessarily, but I'm pretty sure it's public too.
And I'm in ontario and make 22k a year as a grad student. People who make 100k a year have their salary published in a giant list and have since 1996, which, along with their work profiles (including phone numbers and e-mail addresses), and your actual address in the phone book.
So why is any of that public? Well name, work e-mail, work phone, we all are supposed to have webpages with that info on them.. Salary, well that can be reconstructed because our contracts are public, and you know when I was hired, under what contract. So give or take 500 bucks you know my salary pretty trivially. Address, date of birth are all public, if somewhat buried, in records about enrollment (ages of entering students, ages of leaving students, geographic distribution of applicants etc.), and if you make over 100k a year that's pretty much plastered out there by the government on it's sunshine list anyway.
So if someone actually knows my name, it's not all that hard to figure out any of that information. Facebook may put it in one place, but for a lot of us, especially if our facebook profile is intentionally set to public, there's nothing there that cannot be gleamed from our corporate webpages too.
That legal cost might be because it was precedent setting, and because it involved an election and politicians who, naturally, are in touch with a lot of lawyers.
The damages amount might have something to do with the fact that the defendant claimed this was mistaken identity, as someone was actually removed from the polling station in question, just not the person he implicated. He admitted pretty much everything and agreed to the situation.
I wouldn't be surprised if in future you could see the legal costs go down a fair bit.
Oh and it isn't clear from any of the articles I read, but it looks like the tweet didn't materially change the outcome of the election.
The big thing with apple was that *Apple* decides when and how to devalue or enhance phones, whereas for every other manufacturer it's the carrier (and while yes, they only had one carrier in the US for a long time, they had a lot of carriers around the world who got the update at the same time as the US).
The Nexus One and Nexus S are googles attempt to get in on this actually keeping the phone updated idea.
Of course as with all consumer electronics, it is a double edged sword. The carriers don't want to deal with the hassle of a bad update bricking phones, because they are the ones that have to endure the man power of the support costs, messed up inventories and generally angry customers. So to them, they want everything tested every way they can think of, and they only really care about their network (think HSUPAon the Atrix 4g), because there's also backend problems to think about. And of course like computers, customers may be too stupid to keep their phones properly updated, so if you can push it OTA at them, to block viruses etc. that has significant benefits to both the network and potentially the consumer as well. But in doing that you prevent the interesting, innovative things that people who actually understand the technology they bought can do with it. Or at least make it hard for them.
MS has talked about making a developer version of the Phone OS available. That's probably a good compromise, hackers get access to hacking things, and people who don't know what a developer version means stick with their carrier approved OTA updates. Assuming MS doesn't give carriers an update that bricks their phones, again.